by Ann Rule
After they had been back from Italy a few weeks, Jenn called her mother and said she needed to talk. “She asked me ‘Was I sitting down?’ And I told her ‘yes.’”
“Well, Bart and I have made a decision—and I’m pregnant,” Jenn said in a happy voice. “Bart and I have decided we’re going to get married and have the baby.”
Apparently they had considered other choices, including ending the pregnancy or adoption, but Jenn hadn’t wanted either of those alternatives.
Narda recalled being thrilled. “I had never seen—or thought of her—being a mom before. Jenn was more career oriented. But now she was asking me how quickly could we plan a wedding? Could they have a big wedding? Jenn wanted it. And somehow we did it in six weeks—an outdoor wedding at The Pottery in Commerce. Violins and all of that.”
Max and Narda were pleased about Jenn and Bart’s marriage, and they gave her that lovely garden wedding in Commerce, Georgia, on September 1, 1996. Jenn eschewed a traditional pastel color scheme for her wedding, and chose bridesmaids’ gowns of black and white instead. They carried red roses.
The new Mrs. Bart Corbin was radiant with happiness, and wasn’t at all disturbed when her gown swept the damp red clay of Georgia and the hem ended up smudged by the soil. Jenn and Bart made a very handsome couple. When she wore high heels—which she usually did—they were the same height, a few inches over six feet tall. When they danced cheek-to-cheek at their reception, they seemed such a perfect fit. He kissed her as they danced and they appeared to be in a world of their own. Many of the women in the crowd secretly wished they had a man like Bart in their lives.
Jenn looked absolutely beautiful.
They didn’t go away on a honeymoon. They spent the weekend at Max and Narda’s houseboat on Lake Lanier. As Jenn sometimes said, laughing, “We had already had our honeymoon—our trip to Italy!”
“It was great,” Narda remembered. “And we got a baby!”
PART TWO
Barton Thomas Corbin
“DR. BART”
CHAPTER EIGHT
1963–1987
BART CORBIN’S FAMILY BACKGROUND was not nearly as tranquil as Jenn’s. Although Bart’s father, Gene Corbin, attended Bart and Jenn’s wedding, he and Connie were divorced by then, and he was living with another, much younger woman. While the Barbers had three daughters, Gene and Connie Corbin had three sons. Bart and his twin brother, Brad, who were born in Jacksonville, Florida, on December 22, 1963, were the oldest, with Bart arriving three minutes before Brad. They were fraternal twins. Bart was the more outgoing and popular, while Brad’s personality was quieter. Actually, Bart was often closer to his younger brother, Bobby Corbin, who was born four years after the Corbin twins.
Eugene Adams Corbin had once been a military policeman in the service and a police officer in Jacksonville. He was twenty-six when Bart and Brad were born, and Connie was twenty-three. She worked in retail sales. One woman who knew her said, “Connie Corbin’s entire conversation was about the bargains she scored. If I had to describe her in one word if would be ‘Shopper!’” The elder Corbins’ marriage had been fairly tumultuous, and their boys were all very supportive of their mother, particularly after Gene’s common-law wife became pregnant about the same time that Jenn did. Bart had both a son and a half brother the same age.
The Corbins had moved from Jacksonville when Bart and Brad were seven years old—first to Atlanta, and then to Snellville in Gwinnett Country. They settled for good in Snellville, about fifteen miles from Buford.
The Corbins’ home was also in a neighborhood used to the sound of kids shouting and playing. Snellville had a population of about 10,000 when Bart, Brad, and Bobby were growing up. Their house was a fairly large ranch-style structure built on a cul-de-sac. Old-growth trees shadowed the sidewalks and streets where they lived, and they had their own swimming pool, which was the envy of the neighborhood kids. When the Corbin boys were old enough, they spent a summer or two digging out dirt under the house so a basement and a recreation room could be added.
Gene wanted his boys to star in athletics. He donated money to the junior high school they attended for sports facilities, and at least one parent wondered out loud if he was trying to buy a first-string spot for his sons on the school’s teams.
BART, BRAD, AND BOBBY all attended South Gwinnett High School in Snellville. It was a typical conservative Southern small-town school where the emphasis was far heavier on football and other sports than on sex education. Rather than discussing birth control and individual responsibility, Bart and Brad had a health teacher with decidedly puritanical views. They were taught that “girls don’t like sex,” and that if boys were thoughtful and considerate of the girls they liked, they would never cajole them with persuasive arguments or force them to have intercourse because, according to their health teacher, “They would hate it! No woman enjoys sex.”
It may have been a moot point for Bart Corbin, anyway. He didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. He acted in a play at school, while Brad was in the French Club. More important to their father, however, was that his boys excel at football, and he rode them pretty hard. They all turned out for the sport in high school and college. Concentrating on athletic competitions, combined with the “Do not touch girls” edict they learned in health class, they appeared to remain “good Southern boys” in high school.
When Bart went off to the University of Georgia in Athens, he was apparently a virgin. The young women who knew him then recall that he certainly acted like one.
Gene Corbin had his own company, called Gecor, and all of his sons worked for him during their school vacations. Even friends close to the Corbin family weren’t sure what the main product or service Gecor offered was. Some said that Gene had business “offshore,” and others believed it involved chemicals in some way. It wasn’t really that mysterious; Gecor manufactured common household chemicals used in everyday products like cleaning solutions and lawn fertilizer.
Gene ordered rather ugly blue “gimme” caps with his company logo on them and handed them out to employees, including his sons, and a young man who worked for him—Richard Wilson—who hung around with Bart. Bart never wore his cap.
The family business was successful enough that Gene could give all his sons cars when they went off to college. In Athens, Brad drove a secondhand Lincoln Continental, and Bart’s pride and joy was a yellow and white Chevy pickup with a massive roll bar on top and dual foglights above that. Bart added a screened Confederate flag across his rear window. Bart’s truck had the requisite gun rack, although it was empty.
Bart had already reached his full height, of six feet three inches, and he weighed about 240 when he graduated from high school in 1982. He didn’t have well-defined muscles then—he was actually a little chubby. Bart was a good enough defensive lineman at South Gwinnett High that he probably could have gotten a scholarship to a small college, but he and Brad chose the University of Georgia in Athens instead. Although the Corbins’ income from Gecor was substantial, Bart, Brad, and Gene Corbin occasionally gloated about their cleverness to acquaintances, saying that they had managed to receive considerable financial aid from UGA.
Athens was less than fifty miles from Snellville, but it was a new world to the Corbin twins. Both of them followed a pre-med curriculum, with the requisite heavy emphasis on science.
As he started college, Bart was a walk-on for the Georgia football team, the Bulldogs. He hadn’t been recruited by the coaches, and he certainly wasn’t a star, but he played all season and was rewarded with a letterman’s jacket and a watch. He gave the watch to his father.
The Corbin twins didn’t let athletics get in the way of their ambitious goals; Brad wanted to be a brain surgeon, and Bart wanted to go to dental school. He often said he had settled on being a dentist way back when he was a little boy watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He had become fascinated with Herbie, one of Santa’s elves, whose ambition was to be a dentist.
Bart and Brad
roomed together at Myers Hall on the UGA campus. They were big men who dwarfed the small room they shared, although they cleverly designed and built bunk beds with spaces for their desks to fit in below, and made the most of what space there was.
Despite his dentistry ambitions, Bart was not a particularly gifted candidate. However, he developed an enviable work ethic and studied hard to make up for whatever he lacked in natural ability and dexterity. When he wasn’t in class, at football practice, or studying, Bart hung out with other guys in his dorm. And he was popular. His sometimes scathing sense of humor made them all laugh.
There was no girlfriend back home for him, and he was apparently hesitant to approach coeds at UGA. Indeed, the Corbin boys didn’t trust women very much. Gene Corbin was said to be somewhat scornful of women, and he may have passed that attitude on to his sons.
Bart might not have started dating if a pretty brunette sophomore from a small town in New York State hadn’t made up her mind to meet him. That fall of 1982, both Bart Corbin and Shelly Mansfield* were taking a required class in American history in a large lecture hall in the School of Journalism. Virtually hidden in the crowded auditorium, Shelly watched the tall, beefy freshman with the deceptively cherubic face, and she liked his dark eyes under their thick eyebrows. She decided she wanted to meet him. Despite his size, he seemed somehow innocent, like a junior high kid in a man’s body.
“He sat down in the front,” Shelly recalled a long time later, “and I can’t say exactly why, but I just thought he was cute.”
He seemed to be oblivious of her, but she was determined to change that. “Most days after class,” Shelly said, “I would let him leave before me, and then follow him to the elevator. I would always sort of look at him, and he would sort of look at me, but both of us were too shy to say anything. This went on all quarter and I never screwed up enough courage to talk with him. So the quarter was over and I figured I’d lost the opportunity to meet the cute boy in the camouflage pants.”
That freshman year, Bart and Brad turned nineteen during their Christmas vacation. Shelly had no classes with Bart during winter quarter. But she didn’t forget him, and she was happily surprised to run into Bart on a bus to the building where they would register for spring quarter.
“There he was!” she recalled, laughing. “So I kind of shadowed him when we got to the Registration Center and I found out what his name was: Barton Corbin. I was still afraid to say ‘Hi’ to him though heaven knows why—he was not intimidating.”
But Bart’s twin, Brad, was with him in the registration lines, and Shelly didn’t want an audience if she approached Bart and he rejected her. She went back to her dorm, Creswell Hall, and pondered what she could find out about Bart now that she at least knew his name. Shelly was a “Northerner,” six months older than Bart, and she had considerably more dating experience than he had.
“What I did,” she remembered, “was look up his address in the student directory and I sent him a note, telling him I thought he was cute.”
She scribbled that she would like to meet him, and added her phone number to the note. Of course, once she had done that she regretted it, sure that he would think she was weird, and would never phone her.
But he did, and Shelly was relieved to find him quite friendly on the phone, even though she realized that he had no idea who she was. “I’ve never liked talking on the phone,” she said, “to anyone that I can easily see face-to-face. We arranged to meet the following evening in the lobby of my dorm.”
Shelly was a very pretty young woman, with abundant long, almost-black hair. She was about to become Bart Corbin’s first serious girlfriend, and she would have a great impact on his life, more than she could possibly realize. One might even say that Bart would hold any woman who came after her up to Shelly’s image.
Shelly had no aspirations toward marriage. She intended to become a writer or a reporter. She was remarkably bright, although she was a somewhat capricious student who sought out only those classes that interested her, and even then didn’t mind playing hooky from time to time.
More than two decades later, she would recall meeting Bart in her dorm lounge in vivid detail. “It’s funny,” she commented, “how I can remember that night like it was just a few months ago. I was wearing a ruffled, hot pink minidress that accentuated the tan I had already, despite the fact that it must have been only March. I was leaning against a pinball machine when he walked up. We just clicked right away. I thought he was really sweet and funny. We sat in the lobby and talked, then went outside and sat on one of the planters between Creswell and the dining hall.
“We were there a long time, yet the hours just flew by. Despite the strange circumstances of our introduction, we were immediately comfortable together, chatting away like old friends.
“We had a couple of beers, and by this time I had a bit of a buzz. I was sitting in his lap, and my skirt kept hitching up. He was very careful to smooth it back down—repeatedly—and preserve my dignity.
“Most nineteen-year-olds would not have been so chivalrous. It really made an impression on me. I thought he really was the ‘Southern gentleman’ that we coeds were always hearing about—but not seeing much evidence of. So we just started dating, and it was totally natural.”
Bart was soon entranced with Shelly. Three months later, at the end of his freshman year, the men in Myers Hall voted him “Most Likely to Fall in Love Through the Mail” at their year’s-end party.
Shelly was in love, too. They had both fallen hard very rapidly. It was spring, and they spent all their free time together during the week as well as on weekends, if Bart didn’t go home. Very early on, he bought Shelly a bright yellow T-shirt at the Kmart in his hometown, with “Where the Hell is Snellville?” emblazoned on the front. When Shelly went home to New York State, she wore that T-shirt proudly, although no one in her hometown had any idea—or any interest in—where Snellville was.
During the school year, Shelly had worn Bart’s letterman’s jacket on campus. It was a status symbol as well as a reminder of him.
Their relationship grew closer. Early in their courtship, Shelly had once asked Bart why he wanted to be a dentist, joking that “I think it’s gross to stick your fingers into somebody’s mouth to make a living!”
“I’m not doing it for any altruistic reason,” he said.
“My interest is in the deep-pockets theory.”
“You mean for money?”
He nodded. “Dentists get paid a lot of money.”
His avarice didn’t bother her at the time. She knew money was very important to Bart, and she was caught up in the first, nonjudgmental stage of being in love. When they went out, they went Dutch. Shelly didn’t view Bart as stingy in a mean-spirited way, but she admitted to herself he was definitely parsimonious.
The Georgia Bulldogs–Florida Gators football game was arguably the biggest event of every school year at UGA. The game and attendant celebration in Jacksonville, Florida, was famous for being “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” Between the rivalry that grew each year and the opportunity to socialize, every student in both colleges wanted to attend.
“Most of us would have sold our blood for plasma and the family silver to be part of that,” Shelly recalled.
“And we could have gone the year Bart was a sophomore! I would have been thrilled if I’d known that Bart had actually won the student lottery for some prime tickets.”
But Bart didn’t tell Shelly he’d won until after he sold the tickets for a steep price. “I almost blew a gasket,” she said. “And he knew I would. That’s why he didn’t tell me until it was too late. He said that it was just too expensive to go, and he didn’t even think about what a once-in-a-lifetime experience it would have been for both of us, something beyond price. I thought his decision was idiocy, and I didn’t forget it even though I forgave him.”
The money from those tickets was the most important thing to Bart then, just as money would almost always come fir
st with him. Indeed anything he owned belonged only to him and he would let it go only when he was ready.
Later, Shelly reasoned that Bart’s parents were probably struggling to put three sons through college at once, even though she knew the sons were getting financial aid from the school.
The elder Corbins lived well—but not lavishly. She had seen that. Bart began taking Shelly with him when he went home to Snellville, and she got to know his family. She really liked Bobby, the twins’ younger brother, who enrolled at UGA as a freshman when Bart and Brad were sophomores. She found Bobby to be unfailingly good-natured and always smiling. Shelly watched the family interaction and deduced that Bobby was the family favorite—at least with Gene Corbin—because he was the son who was outstanding in football. She never felt close to Bart’s twin, and suspected Brad was a little jealous of the time Bart spent with her. Or it might have been because she and Bart were in love, and Brad didn’t have a girlfriend.
“Gene was nice enough to me,” Shelly recalled. “I think he was amused that Bart was dating a ‘Yankee’ from New York. He seemed to feel that I was a phase that Bart would grow out of.”
Gene’s patronizing attitude didn’t bother Shelly. Connie Corbin, however, was another story. Bart’s mother struck Shelly as a very moody woman, and Shelly never knew what kind of a reception she would get from Connie. If Gene thought his son’s dating a Northerner was just a phase, Connie seemed to view Shelly as “The Enemy,” even though she occasionally surprised her by being friendly. “She could be nice,” Shelly said. “Once she showed me how to cook chicken planks—which is Southern for tender breast strips that are dipped in batter and deep-fried. Then they serve a bunch of different sauces with them. Bart liked them a lot.”
On most visits, however, Connie was “icy,” and during one weekend when Shelly came home with Bart, his mother refused to speak to either of them for the two days they were there. Neither had any idea what had made her angry.